FHM
January/February 2006

DANNY WAY: Best Athlete 2005
Meet the Man Who Achieved Air Travel on a Skateboard

By Andrew Vontz

When Danny Way jumped the Great Wall of China on his skateboard, his rightankle was missing a chunk of bone and had swollen to the size of a grapefruit and he had a detached ankle ligament and a blownout ACL. 24 hours earlier during Way’s only practice run on the million-dollar, six-story high ramp, he smashed into the landing at 50 miles per hour on his feet and then went cartwheeling head over heels. “It literally felt like my foot was ripped off my leg. It was ten times as painful the next day,” he says casually. Way didn’t have any of the tape or supplies he would normally use to stabilize an injured ankle. His only protection the day of the jump was a simple brace as he hobbled to the top of the ramp 100 feet above the ground and dropped in to make history. “The number one thing that motivates me is that I get a lot out of it personally and it means a lot for skateboarding. It’s very rewarding to bring something to skateboarding that’s appreciated and that people respect. If I can help the evolution of skateboarding that’s a big accomplishment and it inspires other people and the sport.”

It is July 27, almost two weeks after the China jump. Way’s body isn’t close to recovering from the thrashing it took but his mind is fixated on his next goal: the X-Games. As he lounges around a house he uses as an office in Carlsbad, California, Way, 31, wears a matching DC hat, t-shirt, and shoes. He uses a crutch to balance his 6-foot-1 frame as he limps into the garage and pauses in front of a poster from the 2004 X-Games. The picture shows Way jumping off a megaramp similar to the one he used in China. It was the jump that won him a gold medal at the game's inaugural big air competition--an event he had invented. For years, Way avoided the X-Games entirely. “Half of the time I was explaining to my sponsors why I wasn’t doing it. The things I was doing take a lot of time and if I wanted to be a competitive vert skater I wouldn’t have had time to create the megaramp. Things have come full circle.”

The 2005 X-Games are in 10 days, and despite the fact that he currently has trouble walking, he'll be making the jump again to defend his title. "I created the event and I set myself up to be the guy who people expect to see doing well in it," he says. "I definitely feel pressure to compete at the X-Games. My biggest fear is that I'll do something more to my ankle than I've already done. I'm really not looking forward to the next week and a half. I'm looking forward to the day after the contest when it's time to relax."

Jumping the Great Wall of China put Way on the front pages of sports sections around the world and introduced him to the general public. But in the world of skateboarding, Way has been a legend since he turned pro at 14. “Danny Way is the most influential skateboarder of all time. Where he went with it was taking skateboarding to the technical era and mixing street and vert,” says Bob Burnquist, one of the best pro vert skaters in the world and one of Way’s closest friends. “I know the influence he has had on my way of thinking. It was a lot more powerful than one trick. They said the 900 was the holy grail of skateboarding and it isn’t—even Tony Hawk will say that.”

Way first made his mark skating vert ramps. But he was an accomplished street skater, too, and was the first skater to bring technical street tricks onto ramps. In 1997 he began building and skating gigantic ramps far bigger than the skate world had ever seen, a tradition he continued in China. “He’s definitely one of the best skaters ever,” says Hawk. “He’s showing everyone else, this is how far you can go, this is how high you can go. With his whole megaramp thing he has opened up new possibilities for the types of skating we do in terms of how big we can go. It’s two to three times what we thought we could do. He’s one of the forces driving skating. He’s an ironman.”

Way started skating at the age of six. "My stepdad was really into surfing, and he'd skate when he wasn't surfing, so we'd push around on the boards at home," he says. He went pro at age 14, and within a year was pulling in $25,000 per month. "It sounds like I was just killing it when I was 15, but that was short lived," Way says. "I was on the tail end of the '80s skateboarding explosion. In the early '90s skateboarding pretty much came to a halt as far as the industry went. It shrank down to the point where I was riding for the best companies in the industry and still barely making enough money to pay the bills. I’ve been through the cycle of it.”

During skateboarding’s lean years Way never gave up. Instead he hit the streets. “There was no vert around, no skateparks anymore. Streetskating became the new frontier. It was all about streetskating. Colin McKay and I were on Plan B in 92 and we were barely making enough money to pay our bills. We took the skills we learned on the street and applied them to the vert ramps. I think one of my biggest contributions is showing the universality of tricks in universal environment.”

In 1992 Way cofounded DC shoes with McKay, Ken Block, and his brother, Damon. When the sport boomed again in the mid 90’s, DC blew up, too, and Way had the dough he needed to pursue a longtime dream to jump farther and higher than anyone ever had on a skateboard “Having a motocross background, a snowboarding background, having jumped my motocross bike 100 feet and my snowboard in a 50 foot range, I knew how far it was possible to jump. I thought if I had the right environment I could mimic that on my skateboard. I just didn’t have the financial backing or the resources to experiment at that level. Having DC behind me let me do this.” In 2002 he built the first megaramp and set height and distance world records that he has since broken.

Today Way meets with John Tyson and Brian Harper from VP Industries, the guys responsible for building the megaramp in China. JT and Brian spread out blueprints on one of Way’s vintage pinball machines to show him the plans for a private skatepark they’re building on property he owns in Hawaii. Like Way, JT and Brian are decked out in DC gear with flat-brimmed baseball hats pulled low over their eyes. "When Danny asked us to build his first ramp, I was like, 'Dude, that's crazy,’" says JT. "Now he wants stuff that, three years ago, if someone had given it to me, I’d laugh at them. I’d go, ‘Yeah, we’ll build some stuff that no one can even jump.'"

The ramps have become so intense, that they're actually straight-up dangerous. “Maybe 10, 15 guys in the whole world, realistically could consider it, let alone try it,” says Brian. The roll-in ramps are up to 100 feet high. The gap between the takeoff and landing ramps is usually 70 feet. The quarterpipe on the landing ramp is up to 32 feet tall. A bad crash is the equivalent of a car wreck. "We’ve been building ramps forever, but now, more than ever, we realize that this is something somebody could die on," says Brian. "So we take it very seriously. There have been well-known pro skateboarders that have sat up there at the top of the perch on the megaramp all day and never went down. They were just too scared to even attempt it."

Jumping the Great Wall didn’t scare Way but now he’s paying the price for his courage. Earlier in the day during a time when he should de dropping into the X-Games megaramp to prepare for the competition Way dropped into the Coast Sports Medicine Clinic in San Diego to discuss his injury in with Dr. William Previte. Dr. Previte is an orthopedic surgeon who works with top pro surfers, skaters, and football players who has handled many of Way’s injuries including his three blown-out ACL’s. Way settles into a chair and Dr. Previte sits behind a desk in his clean white office to rap about the ankle. "It would be very difficult to compare any of the more field-oriented sports, like football to the level where Danny's skateboarding has gone," says Dr. Previte. "In terms of impact, it's more like being in a motor vehicle accident."

Over the years, Danny's body has taken a sadistic amount of damage. "It sounds surreal for me to name off all of the injuries I’ve had," Way says. "I’ve pretty much injured every joint in my body. There’s no question I could possibly end up a crippled old man. " By far the worst hit, is his left knee.

"The first knee injury was actually pretty interesting because we have video of it," says Previte. "It’s always nice to be able to see a mechanism of injury, and in this case we got to see  his knee go 90 degrees to the side. We had some fun with that because we could watch it frame by frame and slow it down to the point where you could make people throw up if you really wanted to."

Way bailed on a handrail while streetskating in 1998 and destroyed his ACL, so the doctors replaced it with a new ligament--taken from a cadaver. ("It was from a 28-year-old female. That's all they told me," says Way.) The operation isn't so much legal in the US, so it went down in Canada.

Unfortunately, the corpse ligament only lasted eight months. The next option was to try yet another surgery not yet legal in the US, and stitch in a synthetic ACL made out of polyester. "That one did really well and lasted almost four years," says Previte. "It’s polyester, so it literally has a thread-count, just like a sheet would have a certain thread-count." Way's first synthetic ACL had a thread count of 80. When that one ripped, they replaced it with a 100-count. "Most people would only get a 60-count," says Previte. "The concern is you don't want to put a 600-count synthetic graph in because it would be stronger than the bone. So if there was stress, then what would break would be the bone. We put Danny's up to 100-count based on his bone density and also factoring in all the stresses his joints are used to absorbing."

Based on some preliminary tests, Way's doctors think this latest ACL has also split--and in fact has been out of commission for two months, well before he made his Great Wall of China jump. Unfortunately, because they're synthetic, these new ACLs don't show up on X-rays, so the only way to verify that one has broken is to actually open up the knee and take a peek. “I’m not going to get surgery any time soon. I don’t have the time to rehabilitate. I know I need it done but if I can get time under my belt to get it back to full strength I’d consider it. But I’m not at 100% and it would take a tremendous amount of time to bring it back. I’ve had paralysis and had a serious spinal cord injury,” he says. He broke his neck surfing in 1995.  “My biggest fear is ending up like that or even worse. I know what it’s like. It haunts me all the time. But at the same time it’s what I know. It’s what I’ve done my whole life. It’s risky, it’s dangerous but I feel like if I wasn’t doing what I’m doing I wouldn’t be fulfilling myself as a person. Other than my family and my brother and my mom skateboarding has been by my side since I was a little kid. It’s such a huge part of who I am that I could never step down from it. If it takes putting myself at risk where I’m crippled for the rest of my life then that’s what it takes.”

Way has a legendary tolerance for pain. But he’s not the only person who has to tolerate his injuries. He’s got a wife and two young boys to think about, too. “I always say if I get this done I can relax and then I get involved in something else. We love each other and have a great relationship but she gets fed up with me being so ambitious about things. She fears for my health, too. These surgeries leave her to be a single mom sometimes because she has to deal with all the bullshit when I’m hurt. I take out the trash and when I’m hurt I can’t do that.”

"He’s the kind of guy that if something is wrong, he doesn't want you to tell him," says Dr. Brian Weeks, the physician who traveled to China to supervise the jump. Way has stopped by Weeks’s office at a hospital in San Diego for a quick check in as well. Dr. Brian, as Way calls him, is a hip, young facial and neck surgeon who surfs and serves as the official tour doctor for Blink 182. Gold records from Blink 182 and New Found Glory hang on the wall alongside Dr. Brian’s diploma. "He's like, 'My mind is the strongest thing in my body, so if I don’t know it’s a problem; it’s not a problem.' It’s totally true. His mind is powerful."

Weeks was positioned beside the ramp the night before the Great Wall jump, when Danny sustained his current ankle fracture. "Danny hit the ground and did a cartwheel basically," Weeks says. "I was terrified. I got down to him and his ankle had immediately swollen to the size of a grapefruit. We went back to the treatment tent, and I’m thinking to myself, 'There’s no way this guy’s going to make this jump.' But there’s such a difference in how people’s mental picture plays into their psyche. This guy was never going to let the injury stop him from what he was going to do. Adversity is different to different people, and to Danny, it’s just another reason to turn up the volume a little bit. He did something on a jacked up ankle that I don’t think any more than five athletes in the world could have pulled off," says Weeks.

Like football players who routinely power through crippling injuries, Way has developed an astonishing tolerance for pain. "I don’t think anyone really knows about how much pain Danny is suffering because I don’t think he talks about it unless he’s really messed up," says Weeks. "He takes an average banged-up shoulder or ankle as just part of the deal. When he mentions pain, it’s usually at the level where most people have already checked out."

Way cruises back to his home office for his final health check in of the day--a workout session with his personal trainer. A dumbbell rack lines the back of the garage, while a squat rack and a variety of medicine balls and stability balls take up another wall. “This is a serious job to him," says his trainer, Alex Laws, who has dropped by to go over Way’s preparations for the X-Games. "We’re putting a lot more muscle on him and keeping this flexibility going now to help him handle the impact of the jumps. Skaters are totally underestimated in how amazing they are as actual athletes." When he’s healthy, Way performs a series of strength exercises on stability balls and wobble boards an hour a day, four days a week. Before the Great Wall jump he’d worked his way up to squatting 170 pounds while standing on top of a stability ball. He’s so agile that he can stand on top of a stability ball, jump and do a 180 and land standing on top of another stability ball. Laws has a video on her web site, www.coreconditioning.com, that shows Way jumping from one stability ball to a second then onto a third. As Way limps around his home it’s clear that he won’t be bounding around on stability balls any time soon.

But just ten days later he achieves the unthinkable when he scores a gold medal in the big air competition at the X-Games in Los Angeles. “Over and over I was thinking to myself, God, if only I had a couple of weeks this would be so much easier. But at the last second I said, do what you can. I wasn’t expecting to win and I didn’t care if I did or I didn’t but I wanted to make sure I put the effort in and it worked out.”

A week after the Games Way spends the day fishing on Slayer, his 23-foot boat then heads back to his pad. The pressure has lifted and he can finally relax but he already has his eye on the future. “I was 21 when I had my severe neck injury. At the end of that I thought that if I could make it to 30 on my skateboard it would be a huge accomplishment. I’m 31 now and I can’t believe I was thinking like that. As far as the X-games and jumping things, I don’t think there’s a time frame when I’ll stop. I go from one thing to the next and see how it goes. I hope it can go for a long time. It’s not about money. It’s not about fame. I have a bit of money. I have a bit of fame and I’m not looking for more. If people want to embrace it and publicize it, that makes it fulfilling. It’s not what’s driving this. I’m all for getting recognition for the sport of skateboarding and to be the guy doing this stuff but at the same time it’s all about skateboarding and that’s the bottom line. There’s no reason I couldn’t be able to do what I’m doing when I’m 40.”